Help! Don't Abandon Us To The O.j. Trial!

February 17, 1995|By ROB MORSE San Francisco Examiner

After this winter, boy, do we need spring training. Boy, are we not likely to get it. The way the baseball strike is going, we'll have to be happy with beer and peanuts in front of the O.J. trial for a very long time to come. If the O.J. Simpson trial proves one thing, it's that baseball isn't so boring after all.

You knew Clinton was doomed as the savior of baseball, first when he didn't sent Jimmy Carter into the fray, and second when he used a dumb baseball analogy and asked Congress to "step up to the plate" to save the 1995 season.

The only plates that Congress ever steps up to are those piled high with free steak and lobsters by lobbyists, campaign contributors and other rich guys. Who owns baseball teams? Guys so rich they don't even have to settle strikes against them.

The guys on strike are almost as rich. It's as if the Mellons went on strike against the Rockefellers - neither side can be starved out.

For a better baseball analogy, consider Clinton as former Giant Atlee Hammaker, who once gave up a grand slam in an All-Star game. Clinton has given up numerous grand slams since he made the Bigs, from Bosnia to health care, and now it looks like he's giving up another. To make matters worse, House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the little guy with the big glove behind the plate, and he's waving off Clinton's signs.

Newt is like former Giants catcher Milt May in his ability to toss the ball every place except to the bag. (May was nicknamed "Venus de Milo" for his lack of an arm.) Last week Gingrich tossed the ball away, and perhaps baseball with it, by saying Congress doesn't have "the wisdom to intervene in a single industry that has nothing to do with public safety."

Yeah? We'll give you some public safety, or lack thereof. If we don't get some baseball, we'll take our beer, Crackerjacks and pot bellies to the streets. If it takes riots to bring back America's peaceful pastime, so be it. You have to crack a few peanuts to make a baseball game a baseball game.

While Clinton was mouthing baseball metaphors about the need for "an umpire" in the strike, Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole mixed metaphors by saying, "The president has apparently thrown the ball into Congress' court."No, that's tennis, which is even longer and more boring than the O.J. trial.

OK, so Newt is right in that Congress may not have enough wisdom to intervene. But that never stopped them before, not when they gave millions to farmers not to grow cotton or spent millions on bombers that flew like the useless bricks they were. If Congress can support the B-1 and "Star Wars," it can pass a law calling for binding arbitration between players and owners. This is a step usually reserved for national emergencies. But what bigger national emergency could there be, now that international communism is gone, than the disappearance of baseball?

Politics is the sport where replacement players make sense, not baseball. That's the idea behind elections and term limits. Who is more eminently replaceable than Bill Clinton?

We can go to spring training and see Oil Can Boyd throw 43 mph fastballs in the dirt and the guys from Pete's House of Ale loping for pop-ups. We either watch debased ball, or stay home and watch the dueling DNA experts. Or get a real life.

That's a national emergency.

Readers may write to columnist Rob Morse at the San Francisco Examiner, 110 Fifth, San Francisco, Calif. 94103.